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Indian Film industry Launching Cyber Attacks to Shutdown Internet Pirates

The film industry is employing pirate strategies to stop the piracy by utilizing "cyber hitmen" to launch assaults that removed websites harboring illegitimate movies, as reported by smh on September 8, 2010.

According to the news, nearly all movies in India are released on Friday morning at 10 am and by afternoon they are easily available on the internet.

Commenting on the issue, Girish Kumar, Managing Director of Aiplex Software (an Indian firm), informed that his company (that works for the film industry) was being appointed as cyber hitmen to launch attacks against websites harboring pirated movies that don't reply to copyright violation notices sent from the film industry, as reported by Techeye on September 8, 2010.

Aiplex Software use to find websites uploading pirated movies. Afterwards, it finds the hosting server and sends a copyright violation notice to them. Further, a second notice is sent to the hosting and if they do not take out the website, then the company would launch a denial-of-service attack on the computer server.

A distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) or denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is an effort to make a computer resource inaccessible to its intentional users.

Trojans are frequently employed to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against targeted systems. A common Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack floods the target system with data so that the reply from the target system is either slowed or blocked altogether. To generate the required amount of traffic, a network of bot systems or zombie is most frequently used. Altogether, these systems are controlled to create the high traffic flow required to launch a DDoS attack.

Further, it was found that 95% of websites harboring illegitimate movies obliged with notices but the problem was with torrent websites that usually don't co-operate. In such a situation, the company overwhelms the websites with requests that cause error in database, leads to denial of service because every single server has a definite bandwidth capacity.

According to the experts, although it has long been suspected that 'dirty tricks' have been used by anti-piracy groups, it is quite strange for a company to freely admit using these kinds of techniques against torrent websites.